Solid Waste Director Fred Hobson's Resumé Fails to Check Out, Again

Like a pair of Tara Reid implants, some things are just too fake to pass. A few weeks ago, Riptide reported on the bizarre hiring of new Solid Waste Director Fred Hobson, handed a $100K job despite the fact that two of his former bosses say they fired him from city posts.

Hobson first got the axe in 1995 after supervisors sniffed out his bogus resumé claiming degrees he never had. But he was reinstated the next year after an arbitrator found the firing too harsh.

Now Riptide has learned that at least one of the universities listed on Hobson's new resumé has no record of him attending either.

Officials from Middlesex University in London say they have no record of Hobson ever attending the school. On his resumé, he not only lists the university but also mistakenly says it was once part of "The Polytechnic College" - which does not exist.

The Royal Polytechnic Institution in London does, but Middlesex was never part of it.

In an interview with Riptide, Hobson repeatedly refused to discuss his resumé and would not even confirm the schools listed on it.

"The City of Miami is in the business of checking everything I put on there," he said. "I presented my resumé to the city of Miami and they obviously didn't have a problem with it, otherwise they wouldn't have hired me."

"If the city feels that I misrepresented myself, then they will get rid of me," he added.

Or maybe they wont.

Two weeks ago, Employee Relations Director Michelle Piña told Riptide that the city had double-checked Hobson's academic credentials (which also claim he attended Columbia University in New York and Westminster University in London).

But Piña then signed a waiver allowing Hobson to be hired without the required proof of degrees.

Did the city know Hobson's resumé was (still) inaccurate? Or was it just too lazy to check and happened to get caught lying about it later on? Either way, Hobson's hiring doesn't reflect well on a city trying to shed its rep for corruption out the solid waste hole.

Michael E. Miller was the senior writer at the Miami New Times. For five years, he covered everything Florida could throw at him. He got an innocent man off of murder charges and got a bad cop suspended from duty. He flew in homemade airplanes, dove into the Atlantic in a tiny submarine, and skateboarded a marathon. He smoked stogies, interviewed strippers, and narrowly survived a cavity search in a Panamanian jungle prison — all in the name of journalism. His only regret is that one time he outed Colombian drug lords for sneaking strippers into Miami jail. For that, he says lo siento. He was only doing his job. Miller’s work for New Times won many national awards including back-to-back Sigma Delta Chi medallions. He has also written for the New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Chicago Magazine, Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and VQR. He now covers foreign affairs for the Washington Post.